Paolo Leonardo | Resurfacing Erasures
From 07/06/2024 To 31/07/2024
The artist chosen for the second exhibition in Via Monte di Pietà, 1A in Milan is another Turin artist: Paolo Leonardo (1973) has been painting on prints from scanned photographs or on advertising posters for around three decades. Since the beginning, the elaboration of the image has had a public and political dimension and in particular the advertising posters have been the support through which to decode and restore the figure, distorting its pop nature through a violent poetics of contestation and distortion.
With clear awareness, in recent years Leonardo has chosen an analogue dimension for his life and work: extremely shy and totally absent from social networks, he has dedicated his research to a selective choice of materials which has also become more intimate and profound than ever; it can therefore be defined as an analogue approach in the sense of slow revelation.
In the new series of Rossi works, inked on prints from scanned photographs, the artist still chooses the anonymity of places and people; although the artist's intention is to further erase identity and context, the scraped memory re-emerges from the paper. The image is distorted and erased and chromatically flattened by red: through leveling the individual memory crumbles and the memory becomes collective; through a projective mechanism, the proximity to the image becomes familiar and comforting.
The past is therefore comforting: the present is not understood and truly welcomed and ultimately, it is perceived as unacceptable. The Artist escapes the intrusiveness of contemporary form, too fast and violent, totalitarian and fragmented at the same time.
In 2005, inspired by the same body of work by Rossi, with the director Daniele Gaglianone and with the sound processing of Massimo Miride, a 30-minute short film was made in which the artists shot a metropolis and then painted it red. The result is a visionary, dreamlike journey and a departure from objective reality.
It is impossible not to mention Jean Luc Godard and the Nouvelle Vague whose atmospheres we often find in Paolo Leonardo's research: this recent small format production whose serial layout recalls the editing of a cinematographic film, adheres well to Godard's idea according to which: “editing is “thinking with your hands” which guarantees cinema the role of a refuge from time, the womb of historical meaning, as opposed to the totalitarianism of the present which swallows up any temporal distinction”. (To think with your hands, doctoral twilights n. 3 by Clio Nicastro).
In 2024 Leonardo experimented with Blue: large and medium-sized canvases and works on paper on display. The female figures of the Oro cycle, also of very recent production, are images of women's bodies recovered by the Association for Historical Photography and the originals date back to around 1870 and 1880. Reassuring and maternal, the eroticism is explicit but free from aggression; they are far from the figures of such haughty and distant models, on which Leonardo worked in the past. There is no trace of discussion on gender, on queer or LGTBQ themes, in total contrast with contemporaneity. They are analogue figures. Gold women are crystallized and comforting; from the Latin aurum, the color certainly refers to intrinsic preciousness but gold is also the metal with which coins are made: the commodification of the female body and image is a topos of Leonardo's research.
Memory as a poetic and lying hallucination gives us compactness, keeps us together
so as not to fall apart, to try to remain intact. Those on Paolo's canvases and papers are deceptions that intersect: memory, illusory and fallacious, painting, "thinking with your hands" to put it in Godard's words, and cinematography, the magnificent illusion.
Paolo Leonardo (Turin, 1973) lives and works in Turin.